Along with numerous denouncements of America’s descent into socialism, one of the more peculiar and fascinating stories to emerge from the April 15 Tax Day Tea Parties was Texas Governor Rick Perry’s affirmation of secession.
Bringing up the idea of secession in the 21st century certainly seems out of place and the Texas governor has received much coverage for it.
In the Sunday, May 3, 2009 issue of the St Louis Post-Dispatch, columnist and native Texan Kevin Horrigan displayed his snobbery of secession and all things Texas for all to see.
Answering whether Texas and its governor have a right to secede, Horrigan determines that it’s just another goofy idea from Texas :
“Mr. Perry should have known better, but he attended college at Texas A&M, a place where myths never die. Aggies stand throughout football games in case the team runs out of players and one of them is needed. . . . Whenever one of the Aggies’ collie mascots dies, she . . . is buried at the north end of Kyle Field, facing the scoreboard. People who believe that dead dogs are interested in the score of college football games would have no trouble believing Texas could secede from the Union. Also, the dog attends classes with his handlers. Should the dog bark during a class, the class is cancelled. My theory is the dog was in Texas History class with Perry the day the teacher was going to explain that Texas’ right of secession was a crock. The dog barked, and, thus, Perry never got the word. People who believe in these sorts of things would have no trouble believing they can be reelected governor next year. . .”
The constant strain throughout this quote is Kevin Horrigan’s elitism. In it, he assumes that since many Texans engage in some silly, but perfectly harmless rituals that he doesn’t seem to care for, that makes them all stupid. Therefore, since Kevin Horrigan thinks that these little rituals are goofy or stupid, it means that their ideas, like secession, are also stupid.
The closest that Mr. Horrigan comes to refuting secession on facts is that Texas, having once been an independent nation, believed it had the option to leave the Union, i.e. secede, if “things didn’t work out.” He says that was not the case because they tried it in 1861 and it “didn’t work out.”
Horrigan thinks that answers the secession question for Texas. However, his assessment operates on the assumption that since secession didn’t work, it is a “crock,” to use his own word. But does he believe that about everything?
I wonder if the liberal Horrigan believes torture is a “crock.” We all know that torture was used but we also know that the United States classifies torture as illegal. But since torture took place, and according to Mr. Horrigan’s logic, that seems to indicate that torture is not a crock. So does that mean torture is actually legal?
Following Mr. Horrigan’s op-ed, I penned a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to take up cause not against the writer’s elitist snobbery, which was the main point of his essay, but his beef with the idea of secession.
So, is secession legal? Is it crazy?
Well, it might be crazy, but it is technically legal.
The legality of it should be evident to all Americans. All American citizens know that the United States was formed by declaring its independence from the British Empire and fighting to ensure that they would be separated from the Mother Country. What is this if it is not secession?
No less of an authority on the meaning of the American War for Independence than Thomas Jefferson believed so when he said in 1816, “any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation ... to a continuance in the union .... I have no hesitation in saying, 'Let us separate.’”
Earlier, in 1798, Jefferson and James Madison penned the famous Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, announcing that the states had the right to not enforce any federal law they did not believe was constitutional, keeping the national government in check. In those days, the states had more authority over the national government, due in part to the fact that the states preceded the Union.
However, this belief in secession was rebuked as a result of the War Between the States, which many, Kevin Horrigan being only one example, believe was because the seceding states were dragged back into a Union they felt they no longer belonged in.
Now we come to the reason why an indivisible union is necessary for the strong national government of today as opposed to the decentralized and deferential government bequeathed to us by the Founding Fathers.
As the system works right now, the states are merely appendages to the national government, more like provinces or satrapies than entities truly in charge of their own affairs. With the Civil War rendering the 10th amendment, the states’ rights amendment, moot, the states are nothing other than corollaries to Washington D.C. No one can get away with saying today that state governments can overrule or nullify laws coming from Washington D.C. Since the state governments are ultimately subordinate to the national government, the people of the states are subordinate as well. If the country was more of the loose compact of states that it was before the Civil War, the national government would have a much harder time justifying the need to have military bases in 130 countries if the real sovereign were the states.
Perhaps the chief reason why secession and states’ rights are shunned by so many today is because they have been tied to racist causes. But believing that secession can only be used for racist causes horribly abuses the proper understanding of secession.
Rather than being used for ignoble purposes, secession is one of the strongest safeguards against tyranny coming from Washington. The farther away the national capital is from its constituents, the more draconian it has to be in enforcing its laws. The closer a capital is to its people, the less so. That was one of the reasons for the American Revolution: the right of local self-government.
All that said, secession is merely a legal right, not an outright necessity. But with seemingly every big industry getting “too big to fail,” meaning that its failure would be catastrophic, there is something to be admired about small things.
Let’s say these industries that are “too big to fail” do fail and havoc is wrecked. Now let’s say the same thing happens to the U.S. national government. What would we be left with? Just the smaller portions, like when the Soviet Union became so big that it had to fail.
So is secession crazy? Is the socialist road our country is on crazy? Seems less crazy to me and maybe even a few others.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Thursday, May 7, 2009
My Letter to The Nashville (IL) News
The following is a letter of mine printed in the Wednesday, May 6, 2009 edition of The Nashville News, my very local paper. It is reproduced here exactly as it was in the paper except I corrected their misspelling of "taxpayers'" in the second paragraph and I have added the links.
Thanks, Congressman
Thank you to Congressman John Shimkus for voting against reckless spending and for economic liberty as he described in last week’s letter.
I would also like to take this time to thank our congressman for cosponsoring H.R. 1207, The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009, introduced by Congressman Ron Paul of Texas to audit our national bank. With endless bailouts and so much money being spent, Americans have a right to know what is really happening with their money. If what taxpayers do with their money is the government’s business, then what the government does with our money should likewise be the taxpayers’ business.
This is an important bill because even though we were promised transparency and accountability in our government, much of the government’s actions remain clouded in secrecy. H.R. 1207 has broad bipartisan support and opening the bank’s books for the first time in its nearly 100-year history could help usher in a real era of responsibility to our government.
It’s not often we can congratulate our public servants since so many of them embarrass themselves and their constituents, but Congressman Shimkus deserves our appreciation for joining a cause that puts Illinois taxpayers first.
If anyone is interested in learning more about H.R. 1207 and The Federal Reserve Transparency Act, I would encourage them to explore http://www.campaignforliberty.com/.
Carl Wicklander
Nashville
Thanks, Congressman
Thank you to Congressman John Shimkus for voting against reckless spending and for economic liberty as he described in last week’s letter.
I would also like to take this time to thank our congressman for cosponsoring H.R. 1207, The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009, introduced by Congressman Ron Paul of Texas to audit our national bank. With endless bailouts and so much money being spent, Americans have a right to know what is really happening with their money. If what taxpayers do with their money is the government’s business, then what the government does with our money should likewise be the taxpayers’ business.
This is an important bill because even though we were promised transparency and accountability in our government, much of the government’s actions remain clouded in secrecy. H.R. 1207 has broad bipartisan support and opening the bank’s books for the first time in its nearly 100-year history could help usher in a real era of responsibility to our government.
It’s not often we can congratulate our public servants since so many of them embarrass themselves and their constituents, but Congressman Shimkus deserves our appreciation for joining a cause that puts Illinois taxpayers first.
If anyone is interested in learning more about H.R. 1207 and The Federal Reserve Transparency Act, I would encourage them to explore http://www.campaignforliberty.com/.
Carl Wicklander
Nashville
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
The Lawless Right
Well, that’s what it boils down to, anyway. The arguments made by those on the Right regarding the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding suggests as much and it exposes the moral bankruptcy of what currently constitutes today’s mainstream American Right.
Along with this discussion have been repeated invocations of President Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to end the war in the Pacific. The argument reads: since Japan would never surrender before every man, woman, and child were exhausted to defend the empire, the atomic bombs HAD to be used in order to hasten their surrender. That, of course, ignores the simple fact that even though two atomic bombs were detonated, the Japanese did not fight to every last man, woman, or child.
What this whole discussion of “extraordinary tactics,” be it waterboarding or dropping atomic bombs, reveals is that those who populate the Right, time and again, abandon their principles and the rule of law for pragmatism.
The most compelling argument in favor of waterboarding is that it saves lives. That certainly seems justifiable if waterboarding a suspect means they reveal pivotal information about an impending terror attack.
But what if a waterboarded suspect gives false information because the action being engaged in is indeed torture and he says whatever is necessary to make the pain stop? If that is the case, is waterboarding anything other than torture or sadism?
And what does waterboarding say of us, a country that prosecuted the Japanese for doing the same thing in World War II? Does it say that activities we label “torture” are only torture when it is committed by other regimes? Answering “yes” to that question makes an activity like waterboarding an ethically neutral practice – its morality is determined by who commits it. Japanese waterboarding: evil and a war crime. American waterboarding: good and definitely not torture.
What is truly amazing is the apoplexy of those on the Right regarding the retraction of waterboarding as a counterterrorism measure.
We regularly hear about how waterboarding has indeed saved American lives because the frequently-waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, “the mastermind of 9/11,” revealed that there was another terrorist attack slated for the West Coast. There does appear to have been another attack planned for the West Coast, but the great ignored fact is that it was called off by Osama bin Laden himself before 9/11. So how did waterboarding save American lives if the plot he exposed in 2002 was long-before canceled?
But this illusion marches on and the Right, and even a few on the Left, perpetuate that waterboarding is not torture, it worked, and we should continue it.
It is shrouded under the cover of “National Security,” and we can see how those on the Right readily throw away their convictions in favor of expediency.
The argument regularly heard from those waterboard supporters is that it works and if it meant protecting the American people from a terrorist attack, then we should have no problem pouring some water up a terrorist’s nose for 30 seconds.
The worst part is this excuse-making on the Right. How many times in the past couple of weeks have we heard the talking heads saying that “Well, those people cut off heads, we just pour some water up their noses.”
It is probably time to point out that “At least we’re not as bad as them” is not a real argument based on reason or fact. Neither is “Okay, so we waterboarded a guy a whole bunch of times, but it was never for more than 30 seconds!” And neither is “Well, we haven’t done it since 2003” or “It’s not torture, but even if it was, it was only on 3 people and they were terrorists anyway, so it doesn’t count.” Or “Yes, we did sign the Geneva Convention and the terrorists didn’t, so that technically means we don’t have to accord them the rights under it. That means we can torture!”
All of this makes the argument in favor of waterboarding not really about intelligence gathering but revenge. It’s like saying “Okay, maybe waterboarding really is torture, but come on, these people are terrorists. It shouldn’t matter whether waterboarding is against the law or not. They don’t abide by the rules, so we won’t.”
This defense of waterboarding on the Right has gotten so twisted that NOT supporting waterboarding is “disgusting.”
Another much-regurgitated argument was the rhetorical question posed to anyone who dared to question the wisdom of waterboarding: What if we have a suspect who has knowledge of an impending attack and won’t talk unless we waterboard? Or “President Obama, what if, God forbid, your little girls were kidnapped by terrorists and they wouldn’t tell you where they were? Would you waterboard then?”
Well, aside from the obvious fact that that second situation is far-fetched to the point of absurdity, let’s alter that second argument into something just a little more realistic.
Instead of terrorists doing the kidnapping, let’s say your family has been kidnapped by one person. What if they refused to give back your family, even for ransom? Would you murder the kidnapper to save your family? If you did, would you expect to be prosecuted by the law? Is it not still murder if it’s done to a villain? Is torture not actually torture if we say it’s for good purposes?
At best, what the Right is advocating is a disregard of the law because we don’t like it and, at worst, showing that values are expendable.
An example of this could be found on Glenn Beck’s television program on Friday, May 1, 2009. With a live studio audience, Mr. Beck, who has a strong independent streak, rejected the notion that waterboarding is a crime. For those familiar with Glenn Beck either on television or radio, he frequently excoriates politicians who deliberately ignore the Constitution. Yet this time, when the argument gets framed into matters of national security and the hypothetical ticking time bomb, waterboarding is absolutely necessary. In an exchange with libertarian justice Andrew Napolitano, Mr. Beck questions whether the Constitution is a “suicide pact” because it does not allow for presidents to waterboard.
Notice how easily a usually strong-willed conservative abandons the Constitution for the hypothetical ticking time bomb. In the most far-fetched scenario in world history, civilizational annihilation, the Constitution HAS to be dropped, even in the more hypothetical of situations. Like deficits, I guess laws don’t matter either.
Somehow, I conjecture that much of the rage roaring on the Right has little to do with actually combating terrorism or keeping Americans safe.
I make this estimation because one of the main defenses is that waterboarding has not been used since 2003. Why is that? If waterboarding is the only way we have been able to thwart impending terrorist attacks, does that mean we haven't been safe since 2003? Surely Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's knowledge of contemporary terrorist attacks has been exhausted. Could it really be a coincidence that 2003 was the year that waterboarding officially ended and the invasion of Iraq began?
What about the testimony of Major Paul Burney, who revealed that much of the time spent waterboarding was to find a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq? The possibility that this is true might just unveil the real reason why our country waterboarded: to better justify the invasion of an innocent country.
Since in most cases conservatives defended nearly everything George W. Bush did, we may begin to see why waterboarding is sacrosanct on the Right. Like the liberal mainstream media that have invested heavily in Barack Obama, conservatives have put a major investment in the legacy of President Bush. Any condemnation (or prosecution) of what he did in office is a condemnation of the Right that gave him perpetual cover.
Conservatism thus far in the 21st Century is not concerned with the rule of law or tradition. It is primarily concerned with making Republicans, and especially George W. Bush, look good. Doing so means that conservatives have to ignore the law. And they are.
Along with this discussion have been repeated invocations of President Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to end the war in the Pacific. The argument reads: since Japan would never surrender before every man, woman, and child were exhausted to defend the empire, the atomic bombs HAD to be used in order to hasten their surrender. That, of course, ignores the simple fact that even though two atomic bombs were detonated, the Japanese did not fight to every last man, woman, or child.
What this whole discussion of “extraordinary tactics,” be it waterboarding or dropping atomic bombs, reveals is that those who populate the Right, time and again, abandon their principles and the rule of law for pragmatism.
The most compelling argument in favor of waterboarding is that it saves lives. That certainly seems justifiable if waterboarding a suspect means they reveal pivotal information about an impending terror attack.
But what if a waterboarded suspect gives false information because the action being engaged in is indeed torture and he says whatever is necessary to make the pain stop? If that is the case, is waterboarding anything other than torture or sadism?
And what does waterboarding say of us, a country that prosecuted the Japanese for doing the same thing in World War II? Does it say that activities we label “torture” are only torture when it is committed by other regimes? Answering “yes” to that question makes an activity like waterboarding an ethically neutral practice – its morality is determined by who commits it. Japanese waterboarding: evil and a war crime. American waterboarding: good and definitely not torture.
What is truly amazing is the apoplexy of those on the Right regarding the retraction of waterboarding as a counterterrorism measure.
We regularly hear about how waterboarding has indeed saved American lives because the frequently-waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, “the mastermind of 9/11,” revealed that there was another terrorist attack slated for the West Coast. There does appear to have been another attack planned for the West Coast, but the great ignored fact is that it was called off by Osama bin Laden himself before 9/11. So how did waterboarding save American lives if the plot he exposed in 2002 was long-before canceled?
But this illusion marches on and the Right, and even a few on the Left, perpetuate that waterboarding is not torture, it worked, and we should continue it.
It is shrouded under the cover of “National Security,” and we can see how those on the Right readily throw away their convictions in favor of expediency.
The argument regularly heard from those waterboard supporters is that it works and if it meant protecting the American people from a terrorist attack, then we should have no problem pouring some water up a terrorist’s nose for 30 seconds.
The worst part is this excuse-making on the Right. How many times in the past couple of weeks have we heard the talking heads saying that “Well, those people cut off heads, we just pour some water up their noses.”
It is probably time to point out that “At least we’re not as bad as them” is not a real argument based on reason or fact. Neither is “Okay, so we waterboarded a guy a whole bunch of times, but it was never for more than 30 seconds!” And neither is “Well, we haven’t done it since 2003” or “It’s not torture, but even if it was, it was only on 3 people and they were terrorists anyway, so it doesn’t count.” Or “Yes, we did sign the Geneva Convention and the terrorists didn’t, so that technically means we don’t have to accord them the rights under it. That means we can torture!”
All of this makes the argument in favor of waterboarding not really about intelligence gathering but revenge. It’s like saying “Okay, maybe waterboarding really is torture, but come on, these people are terrorists. It shouldn’t matter whether waterboarding is against the law or not. They don’t abide by the rules, so we won’t.”
This defense of waterboarding on the Right has gotten so twisted that NOT supporting waterboarding is “disgusting.”
Another much-regurgitated argument was the rhetorical question posed to anyone who dared to question the wisdom of waterboarding: What if we have a suspect who has knowledge of an impending attack and won’t talk unless we waterboard? Or “President Obama, what if, God forbid, your little girls were kidnapped by terrorists and they wouldn’t tell you where they were? Would you waterboard then?”
Well, aside from the obvious fact that that second situation is far-fetched to the point of absurdity, let’s alter that second argument into something just a little more realistic.
Instead of terrorists doing the kidnapping, let’s say your family has been kidnapped by one person. What if they refused to give back your family, even for ransom? Would you murder the kidnapper to save your family? If you did, would you expect to be prosecuted by the law? Is it not still murder if it’s done to a villain? Is torture not actually torture if we say it’s for good purposes?
At best, what the Right is advocating is a disregard of the law because we don’t like it and, at worst, showing that values are expendable.
An example of this could be found on Glenn Beck’s television program on Friday, May 1, 2009. With a live studio audience, Mr. Beck, who has a strong independent streak, rejected the notion that waterboarding is a crime. For those familiar with Glenn Beck either on television or radio, he frequently excoriates politicians who deliberately ignore the Constitution. Yet this time, when the argument gets framed into matters of national security and the hypothetical ticking time bomb, waterboarding is absolutely necessary. In an exchange with libertarian justice Andrew Napolitano, Mr. Beck questions whether the Constitution is a “suicide pact” because it does not allow for presidents to waterboard.
Notice how easily a usually strong-willed conservative abandons the Constitution for the hypothetical ticking time bomb. In the most far-fetched scenario in world history, civilizational annihilation, the Constitution HAS to be dropped, even in the more hypothetical of situations. Like deficits, I guess laws don’t matter either.
Somehow, I conjecture that much of the rage roaring on the Right has little to do with actually combating terrorism or keeping Americans safe.
I make this estimation because one of the main defenses is that waterboarding has not been used since 2003. Why is that? If waterboarding is the only way we have been able to thwart impending terrorist attacks, does that mean we haven't been safe since 2003? Surely Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's knowledge of contemporary terrorist attacks has been exhausted. Could it really be a coincidence that 2003 was the year that waterboarding officially ended and the invasion of Iraq began?
What about the testimony of Major Paul Burney, who revealed that much of the time spent waterboarding was to find a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq? The possibility that this is true might just unveil the real reason why our country waterboarded: to better justify the invasion of an innocent country.
Since in most cases conservatives defended nearly everything George W. Bush did, we may begin to see why waterboarding is sacrosanct on the Right. Like the liberal mainstream media that have invested heavily in Barack Obama, conservatives have put a major investment in the legacy of President Bush. Any condemnation (or prosecution) of what he did in office is a condemnation of the Right that gave him perpetual cover.
Conservatism thus far in the 21st Century is not concerned with the rule of law or tradition. It is primarily concerned with making Republicans, and especially George W. Bush, look good. Doing so means that conservatives have to ignore the law. And they are.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
100 Days In
Before handing out awards to congratulate President Obama for being the first black president to host an Easter Egg Roll or the first black president to struggle with his teleprompter, let us look at his real accomplishments thus far, good (yes, some) and bad (plenty).
President Barack Obama has endured a mountain of criticism for his cabinet nominees and members. A number (Geithner, Daschle, Sebelius) have been rightly deemed tax cheats and have embarrassed the president and the ones in charge of vetting candidates. Americans generally have a low tolerance for politicians who get away with something that would land normal folks in heap big trouble. The president’s claim of a "new era of responsibility" gets questioned when an unusual number of his nominees have tax troubles, especially when many Americans themselves are struggling, as well as when the president promises “change” by digging up Clinton-era partisan hacks. However, a compliant media has done much to keep the new president rather unscathed.
Upon the assumption of his office, Barack Obama was faced with an economic crisis not of his doing, but of which he took complete ownership. His method of alleviation was ramming through an economic stimulus bill in the same manner and through the same rhetoric of his much-detested predecessor: this emergency is too catastrophic to wait any longer; if we wait any longer, we will be doomed. The bill is too important to read. Pass it or we will all die. Sound anything like the Patriot Act?
After campaigning against 8 years of Republican corruption and proliferate spending, the president embarked on the aforementioned stimulus bill and the pork-laden omnibus bill, bringing the Obama budget soaring somewhere around $4,000,000,000,000 for fiscal year 2010. While the spending done by the Republicans during George W. Bush’s reign was beyond reprehensible and also worth protesting, the monumental debt already created under President Obama sends the message that Bush-era spending was only the beginning.
In the whole financial debacle, the president insisted that spending would get us out of the recession. That assertion assumes that since a lot of spending and bailouts got us into this mess, lots more spending and bailouts will get us out. It is an assertion that many Republicans share when they are in power that no matter how much short-term success it might generate, the value of the dollar continues to plummet and making the another recession inevitable. It is the same old solution only wrapped in a much bigger box.
One of the most defining aspects of the Bush administration was its "Global War on Terrorism," designed to quash tyranny abroad so that liberty in American can be preserved. Actions such as the Patriot Act and the excesses permitted to agencies like the TSA and others have certainly undermined American liberty at home. An incident at Lambert Airport in St. Louis, MO has already been chronicled here before, but another incident in the Southwest suggests that unarmed and unsuspicious Americans are still harassed by their government, even under the supposed civil liberty-minded President Obama (begin video at 8:01, then here, and here).
On the foreign policy front, President Obama promised change but so far has not delivered much. He quickly announced that American troops would be leaving Iraq by August of next year, that is, excepting the 50,000 "residual" forces that are scheduled to remain until at least 2011. However, as news trickles in that Sunni insurgents don’t play nice when the bribe money starts to dry up and civil war resumes, there will be added pressure on the president to keep troops there to pacify the latest uprising and make John McCain’s suggestion that troops stay there for 100 years sound like it came out of Barack Obama’s mouth.
Farther east, as the president promised, Obama has already escalated matters in the increasingly lawless Afghanistan. With poor supply lines, a disintegrating Pakistan quickly succumbing to the Taliban and more Afghans looking to the Taliban for help, American troops will be either relegated to being person bodyguards for President Karzai in Kabul or left to wander in the desert until they get picked off.
Why? There is nothing to be won in Afghanistan. Bin Laden is nowhere to be found. The Taliban is taking over again and the Afghans, notoriously xenophobic, are not resisting local thugs in favor of foreign armies. So the question must be asked again, why does the president want to wander in this graveyard of empires?
The recent and much-publicized Latin American trip drew a lot of attention, particularly from the president's critics on his right. He was called weak for merely sitting and listening to Nicaraguan Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega delivery an anti-American screed. President Obama was denounced for shaking the hand of Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez at the same summit. Rather than turning tables over in disgust over the president’s inclination to grin and bear it, perhaps he was acting like a new head of state should act: quietly. None of these Latin American clowns, who have wrecked their countries almost without exception, pose any threat to the United States. Are we supposed to shoot down any foreign head of state that has the audacity to question the God-given right of the American government to do whatever it wants around the world? The American Conservative columnist Daniel Larison rightly points out that there is nothing to fear from these goons: they thrive (or even survive) based on anti-American rhetoric. The president was right to either let them do their schtick or outright ignore them. It was an episode of calm disposition, something sorely lacking under President Bush.
The president’s dealings with the Somali pirates and hostage situation were swift and effective. The situation was rather quickly defused as the abducted captain was rescued and all of his captors were killed or surrendered. He dealt with stateless warriors in the only way that was manageable and despite calls from all corners to confront the stateless Somalia, (bombing them) he has rightfully deflected all pleas thusfar to enter into another tribal fiasco.
It has only been 100 days, but it looks like things are remaining very much the same. The new regime has only repackaged the same old disasters and called it "change." Some things have been good, as those that have been covered here, but the future is not very bright. Debt soars higher than sky-high and the foreign wars look here to stay, even under a Democratic president. As the old saying goes, people get the government they deserve.
President Barack Obama has endured a mountain of criticism for his cabinet nominees and members. A number (Geithner, Daschle, Sebelius) have been rightly deemed tax cheats and have embarrassed the president and the ones in charge of vetting candidates. Americans generally have a low tolerance for politicians who get away with something that would land normal folks in heap big trouble. The president’s claim of a "new era of responsibility" gets questioned when an unusual number of his nominees have tax troubles, especially when many Americans themselves are struggling, as well as when the president promises “change” by digging up Clinton-era partisan hacks. However, a compliant media has done much to keep the new president rather unscathed.
Upon the assumption of his office, Barack Obama was faced with an economic crisis not of his doing, but of which he took complete ownership. His method of alleviation was ramming through an economic stimulus bill in the same manner and through the same rhetoric of his much-detested predecessor: this emergency is too catastrophic to wait any longer; if we wait any longer, we will be doomed. The bill is too important to read. Pass it or we will all die. Sound anything like the Patriot Act?
After campaigning against 8 years of Republican corruption and proliferate spending, the president embarked on the aforementioned stimulus bill and the pork-laden omnibus bill, bringing the Obama budget soaring somewhere around $4,000,000,000,000 for fiscal year 2010. While the spending done by the Republicans during George W. Bush’s reign was beyond reprehensible and also worth protesting, the monumental debt already created under President Obama sends the message that Bush-era spending was only the beginning.
In the whole financial debacle, the president insisted that spending would get us out of the recession. That assertion assumes that since a lot of spending and bailouts got us into this mess, lots more spending and bailouts will get us out. It is an assertion that many Republicans share when they are in power that no matter how much short-term success it might generate, the value of the dollar continues to plummet and making the another recession inevitable. It is the same old solution only wrapped in a much bigger box.
One of the most defining aspects of the Bush administration was its "Global War on Terrorism," designed to quash tyranny abroad so that liberty in American can be preserved. Actions such as the Patriot Act and the excesses permitted to agencies like the TSA and others have certainly undermined American liberty at home. An incident at Lambert Airport in St. Louis, MO has already been chronicled here before, but another incident in the Southwest suggests that unarmed and unsuspicious Americans are still harassed by their government, even under the supposed civil liberty-minded President Obama (begin video at 8:01, then here, and here).
On the foreign policy front, President Obama promised change but so far has not delivered much. He quickly announced that American troops would be leaving Iraq by August of next year, that is, excepting the 50,000 "residual" forces that are scheduled to remain until at least 2011. However, as news trickles in that Sunni insurgents don’t play nice when the bribe money starts to dry up and civil war resumes, there will be added pressure on the president to keep troops there to pacify the latest uprising and make John McCain’s suggestion that troops stay there for 100 years sound like it came out of Barack Obama’s mouth.
Farther east, as the president promised, Obama has already escalated matters in the increasingly lawless Afghanistan. With poor supply lines, a disintegrating Pakistan quickly succumbing to the Taliban and more Afghans looking to the Taliban for help, American troops will be either relegated to being person bodyguards for President Karzai in Kabul or left to wander in the desert until they get picked off.
Why? There is nothing to be won in Afghanistan. Bin Laden is nowhere to be found. The Taliban is taking over again and the Afghans, notoriously xenophobic, are not resisting local thugs in favor of foreign armies. So the question must be asked again, why does the president want to wander in this graveyard of empires?
The recent and much-publicized Latin American trip drew a lot of attention, particularly from the president's critics on his right. He was called weak for merely sitting and listening to Nicaraguan Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega delivery an anti-American screed. President Obama was denounced for shaking the hand of Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez at the same summit. Rather than turning tables over in disgust over the president’s inclination to grin and bear it, perhaps he was acting like a new head of state should act: quietly. None of these Latin American clowns, who have wrecked their countries almost without exception, pose any threat to the United States. Are we supposed to shoot down any foreign head of state that has the audacity to question the God-given right of the American government to do whatever it wants around the world? The American Conservative columnist Daniel Larison rightly points out that there is nothing to fear from these goons: they thrive (or even survive) based on anti-American rhetoric. The president was right to either let them do their schtick or outright ignore them. It was an episode of calm disposition, something sorely lacking under President Bush.
The president’s dealings with the Somali pirates and hostage situation were swift and effective. The situation was rather quickly defused as the abducted captain was rescued and all of his captors were killed or surrendered. He dealt with stateless warriors in the only way that was manageable and despite calls from all corners to confront the stateless Somalia, (bombing them) he has rightfully deflected all pleas thusfar to enter into another tribal fiasco.
It has only been 100 days, but it looks like things are remaining very much the same. The new regime has only repackaged the same old disasters and called it "change." Some things have been good, as those that have been covered here, but the future is not very bright. Debt soars higher than sky-high and the foreign wars look here to stay, even under a Democratic president. As the old saying goes, people get the government they deserve.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Dangerous Torture
The big news last weekend, other than President Obama's (gasp!) handshake with Hugo Chavez, was that the previously-classified "torture memos" were irresponsibly declassified, revealing state secrets, and forfeiting pivotal information in the long war against "Islamofascism."
No sooner were the memos made public did President Bush's remaining supporters on talk radio and Fox News jump to the microphone in a race to be the first to claim that President Obama was playing politics with America's security. Sean Hannity called it "stupid." Rush Limbaugh called the president "naieve." Bill O'Reilly doesn't want to use guidelines found in the army field manual, while in the same conversation, Karl Rove called the action "lunacy" and "a psychological victory for the terrorists."
All of these outrages reveal the twisted logic that suggests that "enhanced interrogation techniques" actually make the country safer.
As tempting as this view is, it all acts on an assumption that waterboarding, the most controversial of the techniques, saves lives. Apparently saying "Waterboarding isn't torture" enough times makes it true (or deciding that anything said because of waterboarding makes it true as well). Or saying "But waterboarding worked!" enough times, even if it might be a little morally questionable, makes it right. If Machiavelli would have approved, then I guess that's all that matters.
We routinely hear that these techniques kept America safe. After 9/11, we hear, we couldn't take any chances. After 9/11, the government didn't know what to do so they used waterboarding to get to the bottom of the issue and try to prevent another attack. Let's examine that claim.
Before 9/11, Osama bin Laden had declared war on the United States (1996) for stationing soldiers on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, supporting its corrupt regime, and offering unconditional support to the Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians.
In 2000, the naval destroyer USS Cole was targeted for bombing by bin Laden. Conservatives, especially since 9/11, have routinely pointed to the bombing of the Cole as evidence of Bill Clinton's negligence concerning the terrorist threat. In this case, they are right. And since they are right, it undermines the claim that torture or waterboarding works and is necessary in the "Global War on Terror."
This shows that the terrorist threat was bubbling just beneath the surface and that the U.S. government could have begun taking action against terrorists because they were showing themselves to be a threat to the U.S., or at least making the U.S. a target. And put this on top of the fact that the government already knew bin Laden was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Surely someone could have connected the dots: the Cole, the 1993 bombing, and a declaration, and figured out that something was brewing. For people who were paying attention to U.S. actions around the world, the horrors of 9/11 were not an earth-shattering or earth-changing event, but a predictable event.
So, we should have known that an event like 9/11 was coming. It could have been figured out by following world news through a major national newspaper or reading on the internet. It would not take waterboarding someone to figure out that the country was due for blowback from its foreign policies.
Also consider this: the media habitually tell the American people that the only people who participate in these horrific acts of terror are religious fanatics who desire to die for their faith. Events like 9/11 give credence to this view. So if part of being a terrorist means dying for the cause, why would they reveal anything under waterboarding or torture? Dying is the goal, isn't it? Why would they bother telling anything even if they knew anything if dying is the goal?
I now feel compelled to ask waterboarding defenders this: What did waterboarding 2 people, one of them the supposed mastermind of 9/11, a total of 266 times tell us about the terrorist attacks that curious internet users could not have found out for themselves?
What this boils down to is that torture or "enhanced interrogation" does nothing to make America inherently safer. The real fear that I have regarding these memos is not that by revealing their contents, they make America less safe because terrorists will be able to train for waterboarding. No, the real fear I have is that the contents of these memos will make America less safe because they can be used as a recruiting tool for the terrorists.
Just as the invasion of Iraq fueled terrorist recruiting because it was viewed as the conquest and rape of an innocent Muslim country, these memos will say to the Muslim world "We tortured."
We can debate until Judgment Day whether waterboarding is torture or not but in the Muslim world, they see an imperial power incarcerating Muslims and torturing them. That creates a further incentive for people who might not be inclined to to join the jihad to do so. And that is why this matters.
Our country has made a mess for itself by not understanding our enemy. The waterboarding issue is just another incident of missing the point.
If we want to make the waterboarding issue moot, then we must make the impetus for terrorism moot as well and come home.
No sooner were the memos made public did President Bush's remaining supporters on talk radio and Fox News jump to the microphone in a race to be the first to claim that President Obama was playing politics with America's security. Sean Hannity called it "stupid." Rush Limbaugh called the president "naieve." Bill O'Reilly doesn't want to use guidelines found in the army field manual, while in the same conversation, Karl Rove called the action "lunacy" and "a psychological victory for the terrorists."
All of these outrages reveal the twisted logic that suggests that "enhanced interrogation techniques" actually make the country safer.
As tempting as this view is, it all acts on an assumption that waterboarding, the most controversial of the techniques, saves lives. Apparently saying "Waterboarding isn't torture" enough times makes it true (or deciding that anything said because of waterboarding makes it true as well). Or saying "But waterboarding worked!" enough times, even if it might be a little morally questionable, makes it right. If Machiavelli would have approved, then I guess that's all that matters.
We routinely hear that these techniques kept America safe. After 9/11, we hear, we couldn't take any chances. After 9/11, the government didn't know what to do so they used waterboarding to get to the bottom of the issue and try to prevent another attack. Let's examine that claim.
Before 9/11, Osama bin Laden had declared war on the United States (1996) for stationing soldiers on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, supporting its corrupt regime, and offering unconditional support to the Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians.
In 2000, the naval destroyer USS Cole was targeted for bombing by bin Laden. Conservatives, especially since 9/11, have routinely pointed to the bombing of the Cole as evidence of Bill Clinton's negligence concerning the terrorist threat. In this case, they are right. And since they are right, it undermines the claim that torture or waterboarding works and is necessary in the "Global War on Terror."
This shows that the terrorist threat was bubbling just beneath the surface and that the U.S. government could have begun taking action against terrorists because they were showing themselves to be a threat to the U.S., or at least making the U.S. a target. And put this on top of the fact that the government already knew bin Laden was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Surely someone could have connected the dots: the Cole, the 1993 bombing, and a declaration, and figured out that something was brewing. For people who were paying attention to U.S. actions around the world, the horrors of 9/11 were not an earth-shattering or earth-changing event, but a predictable event.
So, we should have known that an event like 9/11 was coming. It could have been figured out by following world news through a major national newspaper or reading on the internet. It would not take waterboarding someone to figure out that the country was due for blowback from its foreign policies.
Also consider this: the media habitually tell the American people that the only people who participate in these horrific acts of terror are religious fanatics who desire to die for their faith. Events like 9/11 give credence to this view. So if part of being a terrorist means dying for the cause, why would they reveal anything under waterboarding or torture? Dying is the goal, isn't it? Why would they bother telling anything even if they knew anything if dying is the goal?
I now feel compelled to ask waterboarding defenders this: What did waterboarding 2 people, one of them the supposed mastermind of 9/11, a total of 266 times tell us about the terrorist attacks that curious internet users could not have found out for themselves?
What this boils down to is that torture or "enhanced interrogation" does nothing to make America inherently safer. The real fear that I have regarding these memos is not that by revealing their contents, they make America less safe because terrorists will be able to train for waterboarding. No, the real fear I have is that the contents of these memos will make America less safe because they can be used as a recruiting tool for the terrorists.
Just as the invasion of Iraq fueled terrorist recruiting because it was viewed as the conquest and rape of an innocent Muslim country, these memos will say to the Muslim world "We tortured."
We can debate until Judgment Day whether waterboarding is torture or not but in the Muslim world, they see an imperial power incarcerating Muslims and torturing them. That creates a further incentive for people who might not be inclined to to join the jihad to do so. And that is why this matters.
Our country has made a mess for itself by not understanding our enemy. The waterboarding issue is just another incident of missing the point.
If we want to make the waterboarding issue moot, then we must make the impetus for terrorism moot as well and come home.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
The Fed Did It
Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Last fall the bank bailouts, Wall Street bailouts, and home foreclosure crisis all hit at virtually the same time creating a fiscal disaster for millions and a political disaster for the incumbent party, its president, and his potential successor. People panicked when John McCain, who had been picking up steam, validated his Republican primary assertion that he didn’t understand much about the economy, and anxious voters sitting on the fence flocked to the freshman senator from Illinois.
Talking heads filled the TV screens with each party hack pointing to their adversary, claiming that it was their party’s policies that set up the financial Armageddon. Democrats pointed to the Bush tax cuts and Republican deregulation policies while the GOP said it was the affirmative action-backed Community Reinvestment Act begun under Jimmy Carter and rejuvenated by Bill Clinton that was the real reason for the economic tsunami.
The Democrats claimed that it was all the banks’ fault for the housing crisis. It was because of President Bush’s deregulation of the market that caused banks to loan out money to people who could not pay it back. They used the crisis as the justification for economic regulation because laissez-faire economics, like everything else he touched, had obviously failed under George W. Bush. In fact, George W. Bush did true free marketeers no favors when he made his prime-time television address pleading for the bank bailout and readily conceded that he had to "chuck" his free market principles.
The speech was played perfectly by the Democrats who could point out that even President Bush could concede that his deregulation contributed to the problem. That, however, operates on the assumption that just because George W. Bush said something means it is true.
An alternative reading of recent history is made by historian and best-selling author Tom Woods of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the prominent libertarian think tank. In his concise, highly readable, but quickly assembled book, Dr. Woods points to an altogether different culprit, one that is neither the Republicans’ supposed deregulation nor the Democrats’ affirmative action feel-good policies.
The author asks, why would so many institutions, in different areas of the business world, suddenly collapse and look like total buffoons all at the same time? Perhaps the variable is something outside of them. Woods’ thesis is that the source of all our money problems is the Federal Reserve.
One of the most neglected components of American life, Woods argues that the actions of the Fed preclude us from having a genuinely free market. The Fed was brought into life to succeed the First and Second Banks of the United States by a legislative act in 1913. For nearly 100 years, the Fed has been a part of American life that has received virtually no scrutiny. Woods believes it is time to scrutinize.
The Federal Reserve, he says, keeps interest rates artificially low by continually injecting dollars into the money supply, creating the illusion that more saving has been done which can thus be used in long-term projects such as home construction. Woods (along with economists Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, and F. A. Hayek) concludes that these conditions, manipulated by the Fed in an earlier epoch, also caused the Great Depression.
Woods address both sides of the political aisle and indicts both for their hand in the crisis. Woods digs into the history of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA), a piece of legislation supported by President Jimmy Carter designed to pressure banks into making home loans to people of all segments of society, regardless of their credit history. The act resurfaced during Bill Clinton’s administration and the spirit of the act was invoked by George W. Bush in his push for an "ownership society."
The CRA resulted with banks receiving threats of lawsuits which ultimately led to the lowering of their lending standards, and a symptom of the crisis becomes evident. A condemnatory passage of the Democrats, Woods relates the story of Clinton HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo patting himself on the back for winning a "discrimination" settlement against AccuBanc Mortgage that ended with the bank being forced to issue loans on an affirmative action basis, which the secretary knew full well would end in a higher number of defaults (20-21).
Far from a real laissez-faire capitalist, George W. Bush threw in his lot with the "home-owning for minorities" scheme that his Democratic predecessors conjured up. He regularly supported regulations, even if not in word, certainly in deed.
Woods unequivocally rejects regulation as the solution for this and any financial crisis. Similar to security restrictions after a terrorist attack, the regulations and restrictions imposed are designed to protect people from yesterday’s catastrophe. Regulations are, in short, counterproductive and miss the current and potentially future crisis.
The answer, Woods insists, is not regulation because it has already been tried and failed.
He points out that regulators are government employees, not business savvy men. Shortly before Enron imploded in 2001, the SEC checked them out and found things A-OK. As we know from the Enron debacle, it was insiders who really knew what was going on and figured it out, which, while certainly late in the game, was still faster than the government discovered it.
Another example of government regulation of the economy is the presence of insured commercial bank deposits. He writes, "Any 'deregulation' of the banking system that permits the banks to take greater risks while maintaining government (that is, tax payer) insurance of their deposits is not genuine deregulation from a free-market point of view," (46).
But all of these examples are really symptoms of the problem. While affirmative action legislation is bad and regulations are unfruitful and government pressure on banks is also bad, they would all go away if only the Federal Reserve was abolished. The Fed is the instrument that powers all of these poor economic activities. The Fed is the lender responsible for the money banks lend out to unqualified borrowers. The Fed is run by unelected men and truly accountable to no one. It prints paper money which, by virtue of no metal backing, can never be exchanged, and is literally, only paper.
A secondary aspect of Woods’ solution is to return to a gold standard monetary system. Since 1971 and the Bretton-Woods accord, the United States has been on fiat money, that is, money that is not backed by any metal, be it gold, silver, or anything else. Since the government never has to worry about people coming in and demanding gold or silver in exchange for their reserve notes, the people are stuck with them. And since there is nothing to restrain the government by way of the people regarding money, they are free to continue printing as much paper money as they want. This, Woods concludes, is what makes bailouts possible.
This, in fact, is one of Woods’ most compelling arguments. If money can truly be printed at will, and there is nothing people can do that would force government to spend responsibly, that makes bailouts not only possible, but likely. A currency that is based on an exchangeable metal is actually a restraint on government. If politicians have to worry about people coming in and demanding gold or silver for their paper money, they will think twice before spending beyond their means. Also, the very existence of a central bank feeds into the bailout mentality as the "lender of last resort," usually means it will ultimately get to fulfill that duty.
All of this supports the famed Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, a theory which won F. A Hayek the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. The theory states that whenever a central bank creates circumstances which create a false prosperity through the printing of money, which lowers interest rates, a bust will inevitably end the boom. This is precisely what happened in America. People who would have otherwise been considered unqualified for loans received loans. Woods says it is similar to a basketball team expanding the roster by two spots. Even though two more people get to be on the team, they would not have otherwise been considered qualified for the team.
The point is that reality eventually caught up with the housing bubble and caused the collapse. It was a predictable but inevitable event. The central bank can try to delay the bust but doing so only makes the bust worse, since there would be more time to manipulate the false sense of prosperity. According to this argument and logic, the Federal Reserve is the institution that made the housing bubble and bust possible.
The only downside of Meltdown is a common one among free market uber alles advocates. Woods writes about the free market as if all problems would instantly vanish without regulations and the central bank. While I cannot help but agree that the country’s financial situation would improve if we really enacted a laissez-faire economic where the government actually kept its hands off the economic system, the reader cannot help but notice the faith rhetoric that is inherent to the free market system.
Take a passage from page 65: "The market gradually weeds out business owners who do a poor job as stewards of capital and forecasters of consumer demand by punishing them with losses and, if their inefficiency persists, driving them out of business altogether. So why should businessmen, even those well established and who have passed the market test year after year, suddenly all make the same error?" Now simply replace "market" with "God" and the reader can get the sense that the free market is supposed to be infallible. If only the market was really free, then all the financial problems of this country would be resolved. One can almost see the biting satire of Stephen Colbert and his claims of Republican "Moneytheism." Yet, that is really the only shortcoming in Meltdown, one of interpretation and the fear of parody.
Now that the recession is in full swing, and by virtue of this book, we have an opportunity to confront the problem. Shall we continue to blame everyone on the other side and point to policies that have made themselves obsolete while an institution, the Fed, remains untouched? If Woods (and his polemical predecessor Murray Rothbard) is correct and the Fed is the main reason for not only the current crisis but the Great Depression, isn’t it time that there was finally at least a debate on the American central bank? Isn’t it time that we at least begin to discuss whether an unaccountable government institution might be the source of our problems instead of some inane bickering about regulations or the CRA?
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Tyranny by any Other Name
I recently reported on "a minor victory" when the state of Missouri rescinded its report that supporters of Ron Paul could be accused of being domestic terrorists or militia members. There was substantial outcry over the unjustness of the accusations and the report was rescinded a week ago. Some of us, myself included, thought that maybe we could turn things around if we only keep our public officials attuned to our concerns about liberty. However, an episode that occurred in St. Louis last week should serve as a grim reminder that just because George W. Bush went home to Texas less than 90 days ago, invasive government has stayed right where it is.
Last weekend, just after the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) took back its report, there was a successful gathering of Ron Paul supporters at the first Campaign for Liberty regional conference who met to learn more about America’s tradition of freedom and how to take action in our local communities to make sure our liberties are not eroded even more.
One of the Campaign for Liberty’s few employees (as many are volunteers), a young man named Steve Bierfeldt, was preparing to board a plane at the St. Louis airport following the events of the weekend. There, he received a highly aggressive cross-examination from the TSA that might as well have come from the Spanish Inquisition.
The TSA demanded answers, threatened young Mr. Bierfeldt while the young man remained calm and simply asked whether he was required by law to answer the threatening questions. The TSA thugs either did not know if he was required by law to answer their questions or did not care if he was required by law but kept demanding that he answer them anyway.
This youtube video catches a couple minutes of a rather harrowing exchange between young Mr. Bierfeldt and the people detaining him. The audio provided in the video concludes as he is about to be taken to the police station.
During this questioning, obviously meant to intimidate him, Mr. Bierfeldt has conceded that he does not entirely understand the law, which is why he asked if he was required to answer questions by the law. He clearly says that he will answer questions if he is compelled by the law and will not answer through intimidation. Then at 4:07 of the video, one of the TSA personnel said, "We’re gonna help you understand if you don’t," come with us, that is.
If this had been a movie, and the interrogators were German instead of American, that line probably would have been rendered, "We have ways of making you talk."
As the video progresses, we learn that Steve Bierfeldt was released and not harmed. He apparently gained the suspicion of the TSA goons because he had over $4000 in cash with him. This money, he says later, came from the revenues he got from selling Ron Paul and Campaign for Liberty merchandise to people who are most likely libertarians and who might prefer the anonymity of cash to a credit card that will follow them. And considering the ire raised by the MIAC report that Ron Paul supporters are suspicious, anonymity seems like a rather alluring state of identity.
So what does this whole episode mean? First, it looks like the TSA did not learn about the rescission of the MIAC report or did not care, which can also explain why Mr. Bierfeldt would be so reluctant to tell anyone working for the government about the origin of his large reserve of cash. He might be a terrorist!
Second and still very much with us, are the expansive measures enacted during the Bush administration that we were told were for our own safety and our own good. That was the rationalization many, including myself at one time, made. Hey, if we have nothing to hide, then we have nothing to fear. Search my records! Tap my phones! I’m not a terrorist, so I have no reason to fear my government!
Well, neither did Steve Bierfeldt, according to the law. It is not against the law to carry too much cash with you. It is the Fifth Amendment which protects us from incriminating ourselves and Mr. Bierfeldt employed it respectfully and fearlessly. He was a threat to no one. So why was he being treated like his cash was a machine gun?
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the interrogation recorded is exactly what should be expected in a totalitarian government that roots out political dissidents and locks them up. With the MIAC report in such recent memory, Mr. Bierfeldt had obvious reasons to keep his private contents private. He had plenty of reason to think he was being politically profiled.
This is our tyranny.
Many of President Bush’s remaining supporters still defend the expansive measures our departed leader took in the name of security. They say that he kept us safe from any more terrorist attacks and his expansive security measures are the reason for it. That, of course, falls under the logical fallacy of Post hoc ergo propter hoc, meaning that since these invasive security measures took place after President Bush enacted them, that means they have prevented another terrorist attack.
But this episode reveals something entirely divorced from the idea of national security. Mr. Bierfeldt was not threatening anybody, had not harmed anybody, and was merely asking what the law was pertaining to his detention. If asking for our rights in a certain situation constitutes a threat, this is in fact a tyranny and nothing less.
What else would someone call the treatment he got for merely asking questions. If we should have nothing to fear if we have nothing to hide, then why should the government or its henchmen threaten us for reminding them of our rights and the constitutional limits of their powers?
If this is the way things are run, we are no longer living in a republic. For a republic is a government of laws rooted in the tradition of justice. In the United States, we are fortunate enough to have a written constitution and a bill of rights which tells us exactly what powers the government has and exactly what our rights are.
A tyranny, by definition, abuses its power and represses its own citizens and Romans 13:3 reads, "For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong." No problem there, but what about a ruler (or their surrogates) who holds terror over those who do no wrong, like Steve Bierfeldt?
To bastardize Shakespeare, a tyranny by any other name is still a tyranny.
And in no way is our new president and secular savior Barack Obama absolved from any of the blame for our current situation. A big deal was made when he closed the prison at Guantanamo Bay and announced the end of the use of waterboarding. Yet, he has done nothing to indicate that he wishes to close the equally repressive prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan or stop the practice of rendition whereby the U.S. will not waterboard or torture, but send suspects to other countries that do. He was hailed by many for announcing that the end of our combat mission in Iraq will be in 2011, the same as the security agreement decided upon during Bush’s terms in office.
While all can see that President Obama has done some to alleviate some of the tyrannical burdens on foreigners suspected of terrorism, he has done nothing to alleviate the burdens and repressions on his own countrymen in American airports.
And even if using these invasive, bullying, and tyrannical tactics that disregard the rule of law on our own peaceful citizens actually keep us safe, then would we consider ourselves any more free than the Eastern Bloc was?
Last weekend, just after the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) took back its report, there was a successful gathering of Ron Paul supporters at the first Campaign for Liberty regional conference who met to learn more about America’s tradition of freedom and how to take action in our local communities to make sure our liberties are not eroded even more.
One of the Campaign for Liberty’s few employees (as many are volunteers), a young man named Steve Bierfeldt, was preparing to board a plane at the St. Louis airport following the events of the weekend. There, he received a highly aggressive cross-examination from the TSA that might as well have come from the Spanish Inquisition.
The TSA demanded answers, threatened young Mr. Bierfeldt while the young man remained calm and simply asked whether he was required by law to answer the threatening questions. The TSA thugs either did not know if he was required by law to answer their questions or did not care if he was required by law but kept demanding that he answer them anyway.
This youtube video catches a couple minutes of a rather harrowing exchange between young Mr. Bierfeldt and the people detaining him. The audio provided in the video concludes as he is about to be taken to the police station.
During this questioning, obviously meant to intimidate him, Mr. Bierfeldt has conceded that he does not entirely understand the law, which is why he asked if he was required to answer questions by the law. He clearly says that he will answer questions if he is compelled by the law and will not answer through intimidation. Then at 4:07 of the video, one of the TSA personnel said, "We’re gonna help you understand if you don’t," come with us, that is.
If this had been a movie, and the interrogators were German instead of American, that line probably would have been rendered, "We have ways of making you talk."
As the video progresses, we learn that Steve Bierfeldt was released and not harmed. He apparently gained the suspicion of the TSA goons because he had over $4000 in cash with him. This money, he says later, came from the revenues he got from selling Ron Paul and Campaign for Liberty merchandise to people who are most likely libertarians and who might prefer the anonymity of cash to a credit card that will follow them. And considering the ire raised by the MIAC report that Ron Paul supporters are suspicious, anonymity seems like a rather alluring state of identity.
So what does this whole episode mean? First, it looks like the TSA did not learn about the rescission of the MIAC report or did not care, which can also explain why Mr. Bierfeldt would be so reluctant to tell anyone working for the government about the origin of his large reserve of cash. He might be a terrorist!
Second and still very much with us, are the expansive measures enacted during the Bush administration that we were told were for our own safety and our own good. That was the rationalization many, including myself at one time, made. Hey, if we have nothing to hide, then we have nothing to fear. Search my records! Tap my phones! I’m not a terrorist, so I have no reason to fear my government!
Well, neither did Steve Bierfeldt, according to the law. It is not against the law to carry too much cash with you. It is the Fifth Amendment which protects us from incriminating ourselves and Mr. Bierfeldt employed it respectfully and fearlessly. He was a threat to no one. So why was he being treated like his cash was a machine gun?
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the interrogation recorded is exactly what should be expected in a totalitarian government that roots out political dissidents and locks them up. With the MIAC report in such recent memory, Mr. Bierfeldt had obvious reasons to keep his private contents private. He had plenty of reason to think he was being politically profiled.
This is our tyranny.
Many of President Bush’s remaining supporters still defend the expansive measures our departed leader took in the name of security. They say that he kept us safe from any more terrorist attacks and his expansive security measures are the reason for it. That, of course, falls under the logical fallacy of Post hoc ergo propter hoc, meaning that since these invasive security measures took place after President Bush enacted them, that means they have prevented another terrorist attack.
But this episode reveals something entirely divorced from the idea of national security. Mr. Bierfeldt was not threatening anybody, had not harmed anybody, and was merely asking what the law was pertaining to his detention. If asking for our rights in a certain situation constitutes a threat, this is in fact a tyranny and nothing less.
What else would someone call the treatment he got for merely asking questions. If we should have nothing to fear if we have nothing to hide, then why should the government or its henchmen threaten us for reminding them of our rights and the constitutional limits of their powers?
If this is the way things are run, we are no longer living in a republic. For a republic is a government of laws rooted in the tradition of justice. In the United States, we are fortunate enough to have a written constitution and a bill of rights which tells us exactly what powers the government has and exactly what our rights are.
A tyranny, by definition, abuses its power and represses its own citizens and Romans 13:3 reads, "For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong." No problem there, but what about a ruler (or their surrogates) who holds terror over those who do no wrong, like Steve Bierfeldt?
To bastardize Shakespeare, a tyranny by any other name is still a tyranny.
And in no way is our new president and secular savior Barack Obama absolved from any of the blame for our current situation. A big deal was made when he closed the prison at Guantanamo Bay and announced the end of the use of waterboarding. Yet, he has done nothing to indicate that he wishes to close the equally repressive prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan or stop the practice of rendition whereby the U.S. will not waterboard or torture, but send suspects to other countries that do. He was hailed by many for announcing that the end of our combat mission in Iraq will be in 2011, the same as the security agreement decided upon during Bush’s terms in office.
While all can see that President Obama has done some to alleviate some of the tyrannical burdens on foreigners suspected of terrorism, he has done nothing to alleviate the burdens and repressions on his own countrymen in American airports.
And even if using these invasive, bullying, and tyrannical tactics that disregard the rule of law on our own peaceful citizens actually keep us safe, then would we consider ourselves any more free than the Eastern Bloc was?
Thursday, March 26, 2009
A Minor Victory
Readers of takimag.com, lewrockwell.com, Chuck Baldwin, Ron Paul, and other followers of the libertarian, paleoconservative or anti-neocon Right have surely learned of the lecherous Missouri Information Analysis Center’s February 22, 2009 report for local and national government to work together and be on the look-out for dangerous “militia groups.”
Of course, by “militia groups,” the MIAC elaborated that supporters of Ron Paul and 2008 third party presidential candidates Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin were potential “militia members.” People caught with a Ron Paul bumper sticker on their car were to be regarded as suspected militia members.
No joke.
Granted, Glenn Beck, who has a certain amount of sympathy for the freedom message of Ron Paul, related an incident where a raucous group of Dr. Paul’s supporters overturned one of Mr. Beck’s buses, creating the image that all of Ron Paul’s supporters were a bunch of deranged anarchists.
Even that incident is divorced from the message of Ron Paul and the others. While some might have engaged in isolated acts of violence, anyone who pays attention to Dr. Paul’s message knows that he does not advocate violence but peace. People engaging in violence are obviously not heeding anything in Dr. Paul’s message, but only saw him as a leader for them to follow, and an excuse for them to take part in an event of monumental stupidity.
Anyone opposing abortion, gun control, illegal immigration, the income tax, or suspected that the sovereignty of the United States is being eroded in favor of some sort of North American Union, were to be considered potential militia members. In other words, holding political opinions that are to the right of the Missouri political establishment are dangerous. Perhaps even more dangerous is the notion that advocates for peace are considered more dangerous to the nation than a government that rushes off to war, wastes tax dollars, and would actively hunt down political opponents who held zero communist or terrorist sympathies.
Limited government hawks like myself were utterly outraged upon learning of this report. Could all of our paranoid fears of our own government be well-founded? Could we really be on the cusp of a totalitarian society that is on the look-out for any and all dissenters? Could this be the reaction we receive for holding the radical idea that our leaders should be required to follow the Constitution?
It sure looked that way. While this report was released regarding Missouri, I live with my wife on the other side of the river in Illinois, another place not exactly personified by benevolent government and virtuous public stewards. And Uncouth Ruminations is a blog that does not hold particularly understanding opinions of the government’s actions. And is some Missouri or Illinois state government or Homeland Security goon watching this blog as we speak?
Unnerving and scary to be sure, but a minor victory was scored recently.
Writing in the Campaign for Liberty blog, Anthony Gregory reported that the Missouri government has “backed down” from its now-infamous militia report.
Enough concerned citizens expressed their contempt for a measure that does not belong in the United States but in a George Orwell dystopia. Enough American patriots voiced enough outcry to their public officials that an utterly gross measure was rolled back. For once, it seems, the government listened to the cries of its people and restored a modicum of their liberty.
This is by no means over. The government will still try to infringe on our liberties, but will only try harder to cover up their activities.
But this is the way progress can be made. Gradually, peacefully, and actively protesting our government’s brazen acts of tyranny. We have unfortunately blown many opportunities (the Patriot Act and the rush to invade Iraq come to mind) to hold our leaders’ accountability and fidelity to the Constitution to the fire, but a victory is a victory.
And almost surely by no coincidence, this weekend in St. Louis, Missouri, Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty is holdings its first annual regional conference (which I will be attending and will provide a summary report later). Included in the weekend’s activities will be ways for liberty-minded activists to try to change the corrupt political system for themselves, instead of vainly hoping that politicians and bureaucrats will change their ways and return the government to its constitutional boundaries.
The retraction of the MIAC report was good, but it really ends nothing. Our government continues to violate our liberties and we must hold them to it.
Freedom is a precious gift. It’s humiliating if a foreign invader forcibly removes our freedom from us, but it is wholly shameful when we willfully relinquish it in the face of our government.
Dissent is not a crime. Sport a Ron Paul bumper sticker. Demand that your leaders obey the Constitution. And support freedom from your government. Do not let this victory be confined to the “Show-Me” State.
Of course, by “militia groups,” the MIAC elaborated that supporters of Ron Paul and 2008 third party presidential candidates Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin were potential “militia members.” People caught with a Ron Paul bumper sticker on their car were to be regarded as suspected militia members.
No joke.
Granted, Glenn Beck, who has a certain amount of sympathy for the freedom message of Ron Paul, related an incident where a raucous group of Dr. Paul’s supporters overturned one of Mr. Beck’s buses, creating the image that all of Ron Paul’s supporters were a bunch of deranged anarchists.
Even that incident is divorced from the message of Ron Paul and the others. While some might have engaged in isolated acts of violence, anyone who pays attention to Dr. Paul’s message knows that he does not advocate violence but peace. People engaging in violence are obviously not heeding anything in Dr. Paul’s message, but only saw him as a leader for them to follow, and an excuse for them to take part in an event of monumental stupidity.
Anyone opposing abortion, gun control, illegal immigration, the income tax, or suspected that the sovereignty of the United States is being eroded in favor of some sort of North American Union, were to be considered potential militia members. In other words, holding political opinions that are to the right of the Missouri political establishment are dangerous. Perhaps even more dangerous is the notion that advocates for peace are considered more dangerous to the nation than a government that rushes off to war, wastes tax dollars, and would actively hunt down political opponents who held zero communist or terrorist sympathies.
Limited government hawks like myself were utterly outraged upon learning of this report. Could all of our paranoid fears of our own government be well-founded? Could we really be on the cusp of a totalitarian society that is on the look-out for any and all dissenters? Could this be the reaction we receive for holding the radical idea that our leaders should be required to follow the Constitution?
It sure looked that way. While this report was released regarding Missouri, I live with my wife on the other side of the river in Illinois, another place not exactly personified by benevolent government and virtuous public stewards. And Uncouth Ruminations is a blog that does not hold particularly understanding opinions of the government’s actions. And is some Missouri or Illinois state government or Homeland Security goon watching this blog as we speak?
Unnerving and scary to be sure, but a minor victory was scored recently.
Writing in the Campaign for Liberty blog, Anthony Gregory reported that the Missouri government has “backed down” from its now-infamous militia report.
Enough concerned citizens expressed their contempt for a measure that does not belong in the United States but in a George Orwell dystopia. Enough American patriots voiced enough outcry to their public officials that an utterly gross measure was rolled back. For once, it seems, the government listened to the cries of its people and restored a modicum of their liberty.
This is by no means over. The government will still try to infringe on our liberties, but will only try harder to cover up their activities.
But this is the way progress can be made. Gradually, peacefully, and actively protesting our government’s brazen acts of tyranny. We have unfortunately blown many opportunities (the Patriot Act and the rush to invade Iraq come to mind) to hold our leaders’ accountability and fidelity to the Constitution to the fire, but a victory is a victory.
And almost surely by no coincidence, this weekend in St. Louis, Missouri, Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty is holdings its first annual regional conference (which I will be attending and will provide a summary report later). Included in the weekend’s activities will be ways for liberty-minded activists to try to change the corrupt political system for themselves, instead of vainly hoping that politicians and bureaucrats will change their ways and return the government to its constitutional boundaries.
The retraction of the MIAC report was good, but it really ends nothing. Our government continues to violate our liberties and we must hold them to it.
Freedom is a precious gift. It’s humiliating if a foreign invader forcibly removes our freedom from us, but it is wholly shameful when we willfully relinquish it in the face of our government.
Dissent is not a crime. Sport a Ron Paul bumper sticker. Demand that your leaders obey the Constitution. And support freedom from your government. Do not let this victory be confined to the “Show-Me” State.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Distractions All Around
*Much to my chagrin, I provided some inaccurate information. This post originally reported that the AIG bailout was $85 billion. The cost to date is approximately $192 billion. $85 billion was the original bailout last September. I have also been habitually reporting that the stimulus bill was for $787 billion and it was actually $789 billion. I did not mean to charge President Obama with $2 billion less in wastefulness than he really got. I have corrected my errors and apologize for them.
First it was the earmarks in the famed $410 billion omnibus bill and then it was the bonuses the government-owned AIG executives paid to each other. Both are relatively small issues placed under the microscope and both are issues which require little courage to oppose.
Let’s begin with earmarks. Earmarks are simply money that’s provided in the budget, for projects in the home districts of congressmen. Most sound sensible enough: clean up water supplies, revitalizing a public park, or money for foster programs but we usually only hear about the most absurd of them. Money for experiments on the mating patterns of whales, research on pine trees, or the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.”
It does not take much for a politician to grandstand about the perceived wastefulness of earmarks. Earmarks, which account for less than 1% of the federal budget, are easy for politicians to use to delude the public into believing that it’s all the other politicians who are wasting their money. They can pick out an absurd earmark like the bridge to nowhere and convince enough people that they are fiscally responsible bureaucrats.
Take Missouri Democratic senator Claire McCaskill. Ms. McCaskill, who voted for President Obama’s $789 billion stimulus, railed about the earmarks that showed up in the recent omnibus bill, and carved for herself an image of a fiscal conservative in the Democratic Party. She’s okay with $789 billion that’s either coming from China or being printed out of thin air, but $24,000 for an abstinence program in Pennsylvania is unacceptable? It’s the same reason John McCain can convince people he’s fiscally dependable by opposing earmarks, while being the biggest supporter of the biggest chunk of the federal budget: defense spending.
The president and his cronies lectured to the nation that the $789 billion stimulus had to be rushed through before the earth opened and swallowed us all whole. Then the omnibus comes up and suddenly $20,000 here and $40,000 there are scandals that rival the treason of Benedict Arnold. There is a problem in there somewhere.
How about scrutinizing stimulus and omnibus bills with the fervor the paltry earmarks receive?
Now for the other orchestrated crisis: those damnable AIG bonuses. This is yet another example of the lack of courage required to make a grand political stand.
Last fall, the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-fallible federal government, determining that AIG, the insurance giant, was “too big to fail,” became its 80% owner via a $192 billion bailout. Then, as if out of nowhere, this week it was revealed that AIG was issuing $165 million in bonuses to its executives, an agreement decided upon in 2008, and presumably known by then-New York Federal Reserve president and current Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
Like earmarks, anger over executive bonuses is easy to orchestrate. When the American public learns that the executives of a failing company award themselves with $165 million, they’re tempted to grab the nearest pitchfork.
But compared to the government’s purchase of the failing institution, the bonuses are but table scraps. Both the bailout and the bonuses are odious moves, but bonuses stir more rage than the bailout. Nobody can truly comprehend $192 billion or $165 million, but most can comprehend bonuses fairly well and they know that failures don’t deserve them. So, AIG executives become the new object of all ire, earmarks being soooo last week.
Like earmarks, it does not take much courage for politicians to criticize the bonuses (that they implicitly condoned when they bailed them out last year), suggesting odious new legislation that would tax the bonuses at 90%, or propose that the government forcibly take it all away.
When Old Right essayist Frank Chodorov opined that taxation was robbery, he probably did not have insurance execs in mind, but his sentiments are not far off when the government commandeers money they technically okay-ed last year.
As repulsive as these bonuses and earmarks are, what they really amount to is a big plate of nothing.
In a world of billion dollar stimuli and billion dollar wars, earmarks and executive bonuses are nothing more than distractions from the disasters the government is creating by bailing out (socializing, nationalizing) every company or trying to police every corner of the world.
The federal government has taken on far too much for either realistic or constitutional expectations.
Instead of confronting the realities of the bloated government, the solution seems to be to spend more, rather than cutting back, reducing all around, and saving. And instead of doing that, they repeatedly point to others and blame the problems on those who have remarkably little to do with the current situation: earmarks and disastrous executives.
As more money filters in from China, further indebting us to the Orient, and as the Federal Reserve leviathan prints increasingly worthless paper, is the problem really a park in Kansas or an executive getting another $300,000, only to be taxed away?
What, pray tell, will happen if the economy further tanks after the bonuses are taxed away? To adapt from Richard Nixon, you won’t have AIG execs to kick around anymore.
And when the dollar becomes as worthless as a Weimar Mark, shall we hang executives who accepted hand-outs most of us would accept for ourselves, or shall we hang the criminals who gave us the fiat dollar, instigated by egregiously wasteful spending that is giving us the socialistic paradise that is modern America?
There is more at stake than an earmark.
First it was the earmarks in the famed $410 billion omnibus bill and then it was the bonuses the government-owned AIG executives paid to each other. Both are relatively small issues placed under the microscope and both are issues which require little courage to oppose.
Let’s begin with earmarks. Earmarks are simply money that’s provided in the budget, for projects in the home districts of congressmen. Most sound sensible enough: clean up water supplies, revitalizing a public park, or money for foster programs but we usually only hear about the most absurd of them. Money for experiments on the mating patterns of whales, research on pine trees, or the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.”
It does not take much for a politician to grandstand about the perceived wastefulness of earmarks. Earmarks, which account for less than 1% of the federal budget, are easy for politicians to use to delude the public into believing that it’s all the other politicians who are wasting their money. They can pick out an absurd earmark like the bridge to nowhere and convince enough people that they are fiscally responsible bureaucrats.
Take Missouri Democratic senator Claire McCaskill. Ms. McCaskill, who voted for President Obama’s $789 billion stimulus, railed about the earmarks that showed up in the recent omnibus bill, and carved for herself an image of a fiscal conservative in the Democratic Party. She’s okay with $789 billion that’s either coming from China or being printed out of thin air, but $24,000 for an abstinence program in Pennsylvania is unacceptable? It’s the same reason John McCain can convince people he’s fiscally dependable by opposing earmarks, while being the biggest supporter of the biggest chunk of the federal budget: defense spending.
The president and his cronies lectured to the nation that the $789 billion stimulus had to be rushed through before the earth opened and swallowed us all whole. Then the omnibus comes up and suddenly $20,000 here and $40,000 there are scandals that rival the treason of Benedict Arnold. There is a problem in there somewhere.
How about scrutinizing stimulus and omnibus bills with the fervor the paltry earmarks receive?
Now for the other orchestrated crisis: those damnable AIG bonuses. This is yet another example of the lack of courage required to make a grand political stand.
Last fall, the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-fallible federal government, determining that AIG, the insurance giant, was “too big to fail,” became its 80% owner via a $192 billion bailout. Then, as if out of nowhere, this week it was revealed that AIG was issuing $165 million in bonuses to its executives, an agreement decided upon in 2008, and presumably known by then-New York Federal Reserve president and current Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
Like earmarks, anger over executive bonuses is easy to orchestrate. When the American public learns that the executives of a failing company award themselves with $165 million, they’re tempted to grab the nearest pitchfork.
But compared to the government’s purchase of the failing institution, the bonuses are but table scraps. Both the bailout and the bonuses are odious moves, but bonuses stir more rage than the bailout. Nobody can truly comprehend $192 billion or $165 million, but most can comprehend bonuses fairly well and they know that failures don’t deserve them. So, AIG executives become the new object of all ire, earmarks being soooo last week.
Like earmarks, it does not take much courage for politicians to criticize the bonuses (that they implicitly condoned when they bailed them out last year), suggesting odious new legislation that would tax the bonuses at 90%, or propose that the government forcibly take it all away.
When Old Right essayist Frank Chodorov opined that taxation was robbery, he probably did not have insurance execs in mind, but his sentiments are not far off when the government commandeers money they technically okay-ed last year.
As repulsive as these bonuses and earmarks are, what they really amount to is a big plate of nothing.
In a world of billion dollar stimuli and billion dollar wars, earmarks and executive bonuses are nothing more than distractions from the disasters the government is creating by bailing out (socializing, nationalizing) every company or trying to police every corner of the world.
The federal government has taken on far too much for either realistic or constitutional expectations.
Instead of confronting the realities of the bloated government, the solution seems to be to spend more, rather than cutting back, reducing all around, and saving. And instead of doing that, they repeatedly point to others and blame the problems on those who have remarkably little to do with the current situation: earmarks and disastrous executives.
As more money filters in from China, further indebting us to the Orient, and as the Federal Reserve leviathan prints increasingly worthless paper, is the problem really a park in Kansas or an executive getting another $300,000, only to be taxed away?
What, pray tell, will happen if the economy further tanks after the bonuses are taxed away? To adapt from Richard Nixon, you won’t have AIG execs to kick around anymore.
And when the dollar becomes as worthless as a Weimar Mark, shall we hang executives who accepted hand-outs most of us would accept for ourselves, or shall we hang the criminals who gave us the fiat dollar, instigated by egregiously wasteful spending that is giving us the socialistic paradise that is modern America?
There is more at stake than an earmark.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
The War Drums Beat On
President Barack Obama was elected last November to bring change to America’s governing establishment and end our senseless foreign wars.
However, Clinton administration retreads populate the Obama administration through and through. There has been no scaling back of the intrusive and controversial government measures the Bush administration enacted such as the Patriot Act or FISA, no less spending, and no less transparency in government. Altogether, the scope of the Obama administration looks remarkably similar to the Bush administration.
The one area where it was suggested that there might be a change is the one area where we see the most consistency: foreign policy.
Despite all the best efforts of the Republican Party hacks and talk radio bobbleheads in 2008, Barack Obama is not an isolationist, not willing to “surrender” in the “War on Terror” and perfectly willing to use the American military with the same aloofness as his predecessor.
Take, for example, President Obama’s pledge to remove American combat troops from Iraq by August 2010. That pledge comes with a caveat: 50,000 are staying. This is not the same as American generals staying in Saigon until the Communists were breaking down the door. This is no residual force.
If as many as 50,000 American troops are staying in Iraq to train the local army and police forces, then they will inevitably be called upon to continue fighting all of the warring elements in Iraq. If post-2010 Iraq descends into rampant violence again, what is to stop President Obama from sending more American troops back to Iraq? By keeping one foot in the door, he leaves open the probability that he will have to bring the other one back in as well. It is not as though American troops are leaving the region.
And what exactly is the withdrawal plan for this “residual force” of 50,000 troops? If the plan is for the end of 2011, why keep such a large force there? If I was a cynical guy, I would say that just keeping them there re-opens the possibility that we could be in Iraq for 100 years. What then, would be the difference between President Obama’s plan with these 50,000 troops and John McCain’s plan that would keep some form of military presence in Iraq for 100 years if that’s what it took?
Now let us look at President Obama’s Afghanistan plan. In what could have been as many as 30,000 additional troops, the president settled on sending 17,000 to the graveyard of empires beginning sometime this month.
This plan calls for 17,000 troops, many of whom have already served in Iraq or were trained for duty in Iraq, only to shift them to a completely different theater. Afghanistan, a place probably worse than Iraq, is isolated and highly tribal, whereas Iraq was fairly centralized and comparably united. The military has already acknowledged that Iraq tactics which these soldiers were already trained for will be obsolete in Afghanistan due to the latter's hazardous terrain. Do we have time, in a war about to enter its 8th year, to wage a war by trial-and-error? What will be the reaction of the American people when hundreds of Americans are photographed in flag-draped coffins this year?
And how will the American people react when embattled Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who faces a difficult election this year, might be tempted to cut a deal with a rejuvenated Taliban that controls at least as much of Afghanistan as he does, in order to consolidate power? What will President Obama do then? How will they react when hundreds of young Americans lose their lives for a nation that no longer houses Osama bin Laden but are instead stuck in another inescapable nation-building venture?
If Secretary of War Robert Gates is correct and there is "no military solution for Afghanistan," then why is our military still in Afghanistan?
This does not even cover the drums that are beating for war with Iran. Everyday there is another "new revelation" about Iran’s capability to build the bomb. Everyday there is a new scare tactic employed by the government and the media to convince the American people that there is a nuclear bomb being secretly built in Iran with their name on it. Everyday we are told that our way of life could end in any instant, at the hands of a figurehead in Iran who has no control and barely any support in his own bankrupt country.
Couple all of that with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who as a presidential candidate threatened war on Iran over the security of Israel, is now saying that diplomacy is not likely to work on Iran. What does it mean when the nation’s top diplomat says diplomacy is not expected to work? It’s not that diplomacy might not work on Iran, it’s that it is not even being considered.
Did we really learn nothing from the Iraq debacle? How many "news reports" were we subjected to that Saddam Hussein was behind the anthrax attacks, the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the next nuclear attack?
Hussein at least had weapons of mass destruction in the past, which made the pre-war claims plausible. Ahmadinejad has no weapons, no military, and losing support in his own country. A mountain has been made that they have the capability to launch a satellite. And after all that happened in Iraq, shouldn’t at least an ounce of skepticism be permitted before marching off to war on the drop of a hat?
We have wars that won’t end in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have a war being prepared for in us in Iran, we are firing missiles into Pakistan supposedly intended for Osama bin Laden that kill as many civilians as suspected terrorists.
Considering all the military quagmires, all the negative capital around the world generated from our escapades, the military budget that contributes to the bankrupting of this country, and the fact that bin Laden is still at large, tell me this, what have our military excursions actually done for America?
And what of any of this makes President Obama antiwar?
However, Clinton administration retreads populate the Obama administration through and through. There has been no scaling back of the intrusive and controversial government measures the Bush administration enacted such as the Patriot Act or FISA, no less spending, and no less transparency in government. Altogether, the scope of the Obama administration looks remarkably similar to the Bush administration.
The one area where it was suggested that there might be a change is the one area where we see the most consistency: foreign policy.
Despite all the best efforts of the Republican Party hacks and talk radio bobbleheads in 2008, Barack Obama is not an isolationist, not willing to “surrender” in the “War on Terror” and perfectly willing to use the American military with the same aloofness as his predecessor.
Take, for example, President Obama’s pledge to remove American combat troops from Iraq by August 2010. That pledge comes with a caveat: 50,000 are staying. This is not the same as American generals staying in Saigon until the Communists were breaking down the door. This is no residual force.
If as many as 50,000 American troops are staying in Iraq to train the local army and police forces, then they will inevitably be called upon to continue fighting all of the warring elements in Iraq. If post-2010 Iraq descends into rampant violence again, what is to stop President Obama from sending more American troops back to Iraq? By keeping one foot in the door, he leaves open the probability that he will have to bring the other one back in as well. It is not as though American troops are leaving the region.
And what exactly is the withdrawal plan for this “residual force” of 50,000 troops? If the plan is for the end of 2011, why keep such a large force there? If I was a cynical guy, I would say that just keeping them there re-opens the possibility that we could be in Iraq for 100 years. What then, would be the difference between President Obama’s plan with these 50,000 troops and John McCain’s plan that would keep some form of military presence in Iraq for 100 years if that’s what it took?
Now let us look at President Obama’s Afghanistan plan. In what could have been as many as 30,000 additional troops, the president settled on sending 17,000 to the graveyard of empires beginning sometime this month.
This plan calls for 17,000 troops, many of whom have already served in Iraq or were trained for duty in Iraq, only to shift them to a completely different theater. Afghanistan, a place probably worse than Iraq, is isolated and highly tribal, whereas Iraq was fairly centralized and comparably united. The military has already acknowledged that Iraq tactics which these soldiers were already trained for will be obsolete in Afghanistan due to the latter's hazardous terrain. Do we have time, in a war about to enter its 8th year, to wage a war by trial-and-error? What will be the reaction of the American people when hundreds of Americans are photographed in flag-draped coffins this year?
And how will the American people react when embattled Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who faces a difficult election this year, might be tempted to cut a deal with a rejuvenated Taliban that controls at least as much of Afghanistan as he does, in order to consolidate power? What will President Obama do then? How will they react when hundreds of young Americans lose their lives for a nation that no longer houses Osama bin Laden but are instead stuck in another inescapable nation-building venture?
If Secretary of War Robert Gates is correct and there is "no military solution for Afghanistan," then why is our military still in Afghanistan?
This does not even cover the drums that are beating for war with Iran. Everyday there is another "new revelation" about Iran’s capability to build the bomb. Everyday there is a new scare tactic employed by the government and the media to convince the American people that there is a nuclear bomb being secretly built in Iran with their name on it. Everyday we are told that our way of life could end in any instant, at the hands of a figurehead in Iran who has no control and barely any support in his own bankrupt country.
Couple all of that with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who as a presidential candidate threatened war on Iran over the security of Israel, is now saying that diplomacy is not likely to work on Iran. What does it mean when the nation’s top diplomat says diplomacy is not expected to work? It’s not that diplomacy might not work on Iran, it’s that it is not even being considered.
Did we really learn nothing from the Iraq debacle? How many "news reports" were we subjected to that Saddam Hussein was behind the anthrax attacks, the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the next nuclear attack?
Hussein at least had weapons of mass destruction in the past, which made the pre-war claims plausible. Ahmadinejad has no weapons, no military, and losing support in his own country. A mountain has been made that they have the capability to launch a satellite. And after all that happened in Iraq, shouldn’t at least an ounce of skepticism be permitted before marching off to war on the drop of a hat?
We have wars that won’t end in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have a war being prepared for in us in Iran, we are firing missiles into Pakistan supposedly intended for Osama bin Laden that kill as many civilians as suspected terrorists.
Considering all the military quagmires, all the negative capital around the world generated from our escapades, the military budget that contributes to the bankrupting of this country, and the fact that bin Laden is still at large, tell me this, what have our military excursions actually done for America?
And what of any of this makes President Obama antiwar?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
